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We have migrated to an era where brand experience is everything. While this is so, the age of content as king has not ended, rather it has just evolved. What this means is that as brand experiences become more rich and robust, content is taking different shapes and forms, and increasingly becoming a tool not just designed to generate awareness, but more importantly, educate, inform, build trust and help advance customers on their journey. We must not forget that our current world was predated by one where brands were mandated to be as adept as purveyors of content as they were at being producers of products and services. All of these shifts portended today’s golden age of experience.

Contently's Joe Lazauskas: In An Age Where Experience Rules, Content Still Shares The Throne

Billee Howard

With that in mind, I thought it would be important to speak to someone who still views content creation as a craft as opposed to a commodity. For my most recent column, I had the privilege of chatting with Joe Lazauskas, Head of Marketing at Contently, renowned brand storyteller, and early neuromarketing advocate. We discussed his thoughts on the changing face of content, the need for pushing to an eleven on the ‘BS’ meter to deliver authentic quality content and latest trends in neuromarketing. Following is a recap of our conversation:

Billee Howard: Hey Joe! Great to catch up. Congrats on advancing to Head of Marketing at Contently. Well deserved. With that in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the period of data transformation we are in and how it’s impacting creativity, content and experience overall?

Joe Lazauskas: Yeah, sure. When you look at all of those things, experience in particular, it’s really important how we think about and actually use data. Organizations now have more data than ever before, but a lot of enterprises are really struggling to make the data useful and actionable. Where it becomes most valuable, in my view, is using it to best understand what your customers crave. Also, it’s critical to use the data to better understand what your customers need from you and how to engage them at every stage of the customer journey, and in every stage of the buying cycle. To do all of this, we need to look at data through this customer lens. We need to use this filter to reconcile all the different information we have about our consumers, across all different touch points, and understand what's most effective and what they're most interested in at each stage.

I think content really comes into play here in terms of thinking about core brand experiences. Content is vital to any interaction a consumer will have with your brand. There's a ton of serious decisions that we know occur over the course of a buying cycle. The average executive B2B buyer will consume 17 pieces of content and seventy nine percent of those buyers say that content is incredibly influential in their buying decisions. This points to something important which is that people are going to be consuming content from your brand, and about your brand, over the course of the buying cycle, no matter what, so the content better be good.

Howard: Great answer, thanks. You know a lot of what you focused on based on your background, is using data to enrich content. For the last decade we've been hearing that content is king and now experience is taking over the spotlight. How do these two reconcile together in the sense that I think there are a lot of different elements that are considered “content” now that perhaps weren't in the past that are all vital parts of a winning experience.

Lazauskas: Yes, for sure. I think that content marketing in a lot of ways has been done a disservice and done itself a disservice, by thinking of itself as this discipline very focused on top of funnel activity—your blog, your social posts, etc. That's not the only place where content is relevant. We’re at a stage where any good marketing communication must have really interesting content behind it. If you want people to choose to engage with you, you need to tell a certain story in an emotionally informed way—whether it’s a blog post or sales deck. My friend, Rebecca Lieb likes to say content is the atomic particle of all marketing. You can’t do anything well without it. I think with customer experience is very much the same thing, since content is at the core of all these different touch points you have with customers. I would argue that the programming you have for an event is very much content. It's just content that's being distributed in a live setting as opposed to in a blog post or in a video. We’ve traditionally been taught to think of content in very push marketing way, as opposed to something that could be immersive and interactive, which I think is a lost opportunity.

Howard: One question that comes to mind after what you said earlier, is people often don't realize that B2B content, as you said, is equally as important as B2C content, and B2E content. With that in mind, do you have suggestions on how to approach creating the right type of content for the right audience?

Lazauskas: I think that's a great question. So, actually I think creating B2B content is often easier than creating B2C or other types of content.

Howard: I actually agree with you!

Lazauskas: Good to hear! (laughs) I think it's largely because when we think about what actually makes for good content, it is content that is actually truly helpful and engaging to your audience. If you're a B2C brand, that usually involves helping your consumers enjoy their passions. If you're a travel company it's talking about how those experience enrich the health and wellness of their life. How can you help them enjoy life better? if you’re a finance company, it’s how to help consumers navigate the big financial decisions in their lives. There's a lot more competition for that type of content advice. On the B2B side it comes down to: How do I just help someone do their job better? How do I help them to master that skill and progress to the next stage in their career. If you can help the customer solve that type of a problem, they'll love you.

B2B companies have an expertise and know how. They have a unique perspective on their industry. They have specialized knowledge that people crave. So the question then becomes instead of just saying, “This is the product message, we have to push out a campaign that depicts how we can really help them understand this wider and more complex problem they're trying to solve. Educating people in this way with your content is crucial to that. There is really no other way to do it.

Howard: Those are all great points. You teed up what I was going to ask you about next, which is people for a long time now have been talking about the need to talk about the why as opposed to just the what. I don't think that's anything new, but what I think is becoming more and more critical, is the need to find ways of building trust at every stage of the customer journey. I'm curious if you have thoughts on best practices for embedding trust in content and how that works.

Lazauskas: I think there is incredible power in that. It’s super simple. Don’t be full of shit. If you're trying to trick people into buying your product, people are going to hear that. People are smart. If you're focused on genuinely helping them solve a problem, and getting to the best answer, you’re going to be much more successful. Being willing to talk about an alternate way of solving a problem that doesn't just involve the systems you already have inside your organization is very important. it’s also important to help clients think about analytics that are just theirs, separate from ours, and ones they already work with.

What we find with our clients is that if you just solely focused on helping your target audience accomplish the things they're trying to accomplish, they will trust you and they'll want you to be a part of their journey. That’s the hardest thing often for a lot of brands to master because there's so many voices inside organization being like “hey why are we not talking about this” or “why are we not playing this up here.” You’ve got to put your own B.S. meter up to an eleven. People recoil when they feel like you're really selling to them. This is the core reason people just want to feel like the companies that they work with are actually going to try and help them because that's the expectation for what type of partner you'll be in the long run.

Howard: That that's a great point and that might account for why we're kind of seeing a market correction of not airing too much on the side of brand purpose and focusing on brand utility, as you actually need to focus on both.

Lazauskas: That’s a really interesting idea. So you're saying brands have invested a lot in screaming to the world that they’re for vague ideals like “unity,” as opposed to actually just living some very specific thing where they're actually helping people.

Howard: Exactly. You need to deliver on both brand promise and brand utility and do so in a way that emotionally and rationally engages and demonstrates a keen understanding of your target.

Lazauskas: Oh yeah, I totally agree with you. So I think that you need to still talk to your customers and prospects about who you are. But there's a huge power in actually understanding and knowing on a human level the people that you're selling to. Like for me, the best gift that I got in my current job as Head of Marketing was my previous role as the Head of Content Strategy. I spent just so much intimate time with our customers and prospects. Understanding their problems, understanding how they work, both in workshop conversations where you taking the things really deep, and also in those happy hour conversations were they tell you the real stuff that doesn't always come out when you're actually in the office. Really understanding people is so valuable. Tuning into that skill set within yourself is invaluable to succeeding today without question.

Howard: I'm glad that you agree because obviously I value your opinion. With that in mind, when we first met, it was over neuroscience and its future. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on where we're at with the neuroscience revolution. We seem to be moving ahead pretty quickly from a period of tremendous amount of skepticism over the last several years.

Lazauskas: Absolutely. I think it's a really exciting time. You know I certainly don't purport myself to be an expert, although I've spent a good amount of time talking with folks in the field and understanding what they're working on. I think there's so much insight that these new neuroscience technologies can give us about what folks truly respond to on an emotional level that goes deeper than what we have ever had access to before. I think neuro-research and insights can be so much more accurate than just self-reporting because self-reporting is mired in so many different biases about what we want the researchers to think and what we want to think about ourselves. Actually looking at someone's neurological and physiological response gives us a much broader and unbiased story.

For me, it's all really exciting. I think the challenge that is not employing a kitchen sink approach If you look at every single data point. It's hard to slice through to really see what data is really telling us. I think that the companies taking more of a machine learning approach to hone in on a few key signals to really get at what emotional engagement immersion really is are on the best path. From people I talk to, that’s what I understand will be the winning approach, moving from this kitchen sink everything approach, to one with more precision and focus. I’m super excited to see what’s to come and think neuroscience will have an interesting continued impact on content and marketing over the years to come.